101 Articles Wiki Spam
WIKI SPAM
Wikis are web software that helps people to directly post their views and content without any censorship. With the invention of Wikipedia.com, Wikis had become very popular. We had the revolution of Wikipedia.com now we have wikileaks.ch. Wikis are free to download and use and more and more universities, non-profit organizations and common people are using wikis on their websites. Wikis help people give their opinion directly. There are many projects that need direct input from people and for achieving this wikis are useful.
Wikis are also subject to abuse from content thieves, content saboteurs, link spammers etc. Due to the nature of wiki's being easy to edit, a spammer will drop his links and it can never be detected. Most wikis are very popular since they sit on big non-profit websites, universities which already have strong link popularity for their main domain. One big example of a strong wiki is Wikipedia.com.
Wikipedia is the worlds' most popular wiki and it is not exempted from spammers. Most of the pages in Wikipedia.com have high PageRank which is a big lure for spammers.
Before 2005, wikipedia.com never had the nofollow tag which means all links from Wikipedia.com is counted as a valuable link to any site. Everyone used Wikipedia as a big authority to build links. But in 2005 wikipedia.com added the nofollow tag, which tells the search engines not to pass any link power to that link. This is not the case with other wikis, there are still 100s of wikis that don't have nofollow tags and are vulnerable to link spammers.
Best way to avoid the link spammers is to make all wikis nofollow default, like the way Wordpress comments and BlogSpot comments are meant to be. Wiki spam has been in existence and still work as an effective way of link building.
 |
Images |
The above image shows that after the intervention of the no follow tag by the wikis in 2005, which tells the search engines not to pass any link power to the embedded links. This protects wikis from having spammy links. The no follow tag will avoid link spamming from spammers.
 |
Screen Shots |
The below mentioned screen shot gives a brief description about wiki spam.
Example of wiki comment spam:
 |
Survey |
 |
Working Examples |
(http://roblox.wikia.com/wiki/Spam)
 |
References |
 |
Other sites that refer to the same manipulation tactic are as follows |